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Thursday, May 26, 2011

Climate Change

Is there such a thing as climate change? Yes. Climates have changed all over planet earth. They've been changing forever. If they didn't, maybe the dinosaurs would still be the top of the food chain.

Is man responsible for climate change.? Qualified yes. Everything man does has some effect on the climate.

Is man the primary cause of climate change? I don't know. I'm only a lay person who's studied some of the available data. It does seem possible that other factors -natural long climate cycles or civilization is too young to have recorded, solar changes, deep planetary changes, and other poorly understood mechanisms, contribute. How much, I don't know. Maybe almost all of it, maybe very little.

Here's where it gets interesting. What do we do about it?

What we don't do is Carbon Credits. Looks like a license to pollute to me. Most likely it's a another financial scheme to inflate trade in essentially nothing.

Imagine if there's almost no man made influence to the climate. Many do. Too many who believe that way then go on to say it's Okay to build more coal plants. I say, no, it isn't. Coal plants in the Midwest are the reason the trout in my lake have dangerous levels of mercury. Fix that before you build another one. In fact, figure out how to shut down the existing ones.

The solutions to climate change tend to be good solutions to the pollution problem. Wind and solar are good examples. Hydro is fine, but the planet is pretty near maxed out as far as that goes. Just about every place that could have good cheap hydro has it.

The major exception is nuclear power. Some bone heads claim that nuclear power doesn't generate CO2. The mining of uranium, and construction of nuke plants certainly produce a lot of CO2. It's like saying nuclear doesn't pollute -which is true of you ignore things like Japanese nuclear plant melt downs spewing radioactive isotopes all across the planet.

Conservation and efficiency are often cited as good tools to battle climate change. They are good ideas in their own right. Very good for fighting pollution and very good for dealing with resource depletion.

Anybody else think it's a bad idea to foul our own nest? Most animals are smarter than that. (not all, porcupine dens are disgusting), but how smart is man?

Our one evolutionary advantage is our big brain. Shouldn't we be using it. Reducing CO2 would happen as a side effect of reducing pollution. Let's stop debating climate change, trying to profit by it, gain political power by it, or use it for an excuse to do nothing. Let's get back to making the earth a better place to live.

If a earthquake and tsunami hit a wind farm, the impact would be a heck of a lot less than nuke plant. If a hurricane or tornado blows over solar panels, what happens? Some of them break, releasing almost nothing harmful into the environment. Let's do the smart thing for a change.

Climate change? Let's fix the pollution problem and then see where we are. Best way to test if man is contributing significantly to climate change is to stop.

2 comments:

We put "scrubbers" in the smoke stacks of our industry and Mother Earth thanks us with an erupting volcano spuing dust that will incircle the globe. And the warming issue; may be unavoidable. The sun is growing in size and some day (all be it millions of years) it will turn us into a cinder. But of course, until then, we should clean up our act, for sure.

About Me

I live in an area of NH known as the Great North Woods. I'm in my dome-i-cile out in the county with my lovely wife and a varying number of family and friends
-part red neck, part hippie but all country. Experimenting and enjoying the adventure of life.